Understand a PI AF collective installation and upgrade

Important: PI AF collectives are if you are using one of the supported cloud database platforms to deploy and manage your PI AF database. If AF Server 2024 R2 is configured to use the on-premise edition of SQL, PI AF collectives are supported and will work. If you have opted to use the cloud edition of Azure SQL Database, PI AF collectives will be blocked at creation and not work.

PI AF collectives are an option for implementing high availability for your PI AF server deployment and use SQL Server replication to copy data from the primary PI AF SQL database computer to each of the secondary PI AF SQL database computers.

We recommend using Failover Cluster or NLB options instead of PI AF collectives for high availability Asset Framework deployments.

Important: When setting up OpenID Connect (OIDC) authentication for AF servers in a high availability environment, all members need to be configured for OIDC.

Note: Secondary PI AF collective members are read-only and applications that require writes to the PI AF Configuration database (such as asset analytics and notifications) or applications that write event frames will not work when the PI AF collective primary server is unavailable.